Georg Kreisler – the darkest, most mysterious, perhaps best lyrical poet in German language, who only failed to win many a literary award because his black masterworks are set to music. Daniel Kehlmann presents a selection of his favorite songs and talks to Kreisler about writing, music and the state of the world, about which Kreisler always had exclusively bad things to say – and was invariably proven right.

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975, the son of theater
director Michael Kehlmann and actress Dagmar Mettler. In 1981, the
family moved to Vienna, where he attended the Kollegium Kalksburg, a
Jesuit school, and subsequently studied philosophy and German
literature at the University of Vienna. In 1997, his first novel, Beerholms Vorstellung,
was published. He has held literary teaching positions in
Mainz,Wiesbaden and Göttingen and has won numerous awards, including
the Candide Prize, the Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the
Doderer Prize, Kleist Prize, WELT Prize for Literature, the Per
Olov Enquist Prize and the Thomas Mann Prize. Kehlmann’s reviews and
essays have been published by numerous magazines and newspapers. His
novel Ich und Kaminiski was an international success, the novel Die Vermessung der Welt,
translated into forty languages so far, became one of the most
successful novels in post-war Germany. Daniel Kehlmann lives in Vienna
and Berlin. As “Poet in Residence”, he is the curator of this year's
literature program at the Salzburg Festival and has invited different
artists to present their work, their view of the world, our times and
also of Austria, together with him.